Before we get started, I would like to admit that we are still learning to disbud-especially the buck kids-and have some good years, and some bad years. Like the year we had a bleeder for the first disbudding of the year, that gushed and gushed(you'd think using a red hot iron that anything would be cauterized) and freaked me out, so I was ultra careful on the rest of kids, didn't do them properly, and ended up with a lot of scurs, and two more bleeders. We have never had kids bleed before or after that year, so I still have no clue what the issue was. Some people said that it means you didn't hold the iron on long enough, and to just reapply it to stop the bleeding. However, reapplying the iron did not staunch the flow, only a pressure bandage did, and one of the bleeders ended up with scurs, but the other two were properly disbudded-if they'd been done improperly, wouldn't they have had scurs? Anyway...
Always in the past we have disbudded with an iron that requires us to use bed of coals or a torch to heat up. Because it is somewhat of a pain to build a fire or rig up a torch holding device, as well as make sure I was in a metal/concrete environment to avoid burning anything down, we bought an electric iron this year to try out but had very bad results.
First of all, the tip of the electric iron shed tons of heat and I had to have a hard surface to put it on anyway. I put it in a metal rabbit dropping pan, only to have it heat the pan up so hot that it singed the rug underneath of it. The electric iron also took a long time to heat up, probably 15 minutes, compared to the other iron which takes 5 minutes. It also lost heat extremely quickly after doing one horn bud, and had to slowly heat up again. It didn't get very hot compared to the other iron, and this is mainly where I ran into problems-I couldn't get a good burn. Researching, I read anywhere from 15-30 seconds, which is a very long time to hold an extremely hot iron on the top of a screaming, struggling goat kid's head! With my other iron, it gets red hot and I only apply it for 5 seconds, max. I do know most breeders use the electric iron, but I just can't bring myself to hold it on that poor kid's head for that long. As a result, we had a ton of scurs this year-actually, all except one of the kids disbudded with the electric iron had scurs.
So I will admit that it is very likely not the iron's fault, but the user. However, the electric iron solved none of the issues I hoped it would, and had a big time drawback as well. I will stick with the old fashioned iron that I heat up with a torch.
Below are the results of this new iron experiment.
Antoinette, the first kid of the year, was born before I had the new iron, so was disbudded with the old one. She looks clean and neat.
The following kids were all disbudded with the new, electric iron.
This is a buck, so of course his scurs are bigger than the does' are.
Doe
Doe
Doe
Buck
Doe
Buck
About this time I started realizing that I wasn't doing it nearly long enough, and managed to properly disbud this single doe kid with the electric iron.
When I got to two bucks that we wanted to keep, I switched back to the old iron and did these two. They do have small scurs, but like I said, I am still figuring out all the tricks and bucks are extremely hard to properly disbud so that they will have no scurs at all.
I gave up on the electric iron, and finished up the year with these 4 doe kids, disbudding them properly and much more quickly, with the old, non-electric iron.
So to recap: yes, I fully blame user error for the bad results, but will be sticking with the old iron anyway.
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